Buy from a puppy-mill retail outlet or Internet site, and you’re supporting this

May 29, 2009

Details of the Washington state  puppy-mill bust are here. The person who “cared for” these dogs has relinquished ownership of them.

Get your pets from a shelter, rescue group or a compassionate, reputable and ethical  breeder. Or this — dogs spending their lives in a shopping cart — is on your soul.

Already have a pet? I won’t buy so much as a pet toy from a puppy mill retail outlet, and I encourage you to do the same.

This only ends when WE end it. Everyone who bought a puppy  that came from this miller kept these dogs living in a shopping cart.

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Filed under: puppy mills — Gina Spadafori @ 7:45 am

Haters, lies and what we’re not learning from our pets

May 28, 2009

If ever there were a case that a passle of wrongs don’t make a right, take a look at the kerfluffle over the report by an Atlanta TV station on the Humane Society of the United States.

The first wrong was the piece itself, which was pulled down after the HSUS cried foul over the contents. This triggered an Internet game of whack-a-mole, as the piece popped up seemingly everywhere, and when that seemed to abate, the transcript was floated around instead.

Mainly, the piece claimed the HSUS raised money under false pretenses, giving the impression that the advocacy group claims direct responsibility for shelter operations, which it does not and does not claim to. But that wasn’t good enough for the TV station, which reported:

Critics tell Channel 2 Action News reporter Amanda Rosseter that this isn’t just consumers misunderstanding who they are giving in to – but an organization actively misleading donors to get money.

“They do their marketing very well, that’s for sure,” said Trey Burley of PAWS Atlanta.

Critics say the national organization takes advantage of people who think they are giving to local shelters. DeKalb’s “PAWS” shelter says there is no regular funding help from the $100 million HSUS budget.

“I think that some of the folks who donate to the national organization may be under the false pretense that that money is going to a local cause,” said Burley.

This isn’t news. In fact, there’s a section in my book “Dogs For Dummies” (1994) that discusses the importance of direct donations to local shelters and rescue groups. When you give to the HSUS, you’re providing mostly for animal advocacy, lobbying for animal laws and investigations. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.

Without even creasing my brow I can think of a dozen non-animal-related organizations that do the same. Lobbying, after all, is a stand-alone business, and I doubt many of the professional lobbyists in Washington or Sacramento spend much of their time involved with the management of the industry groups  or social interests they represent. (Pulitzer prize-winning reporter John Woestendiek of the OhMiDog blog takes apart the TV piece, here.)

What happened next was perhaps politically predictable but still sleazy: An effort to raise money for anti-forced spay-neuter lobbying efforts,  suggesting that the HSUS was not correcting the record but burying the truth by demanding the TV piece be pulled down.

The perpetrator? PetPac, which has been a tireless fighter against forced spay-neuter laws and the drive by spittle-spewing animal-rights haters to push reputable, ethical breeders into extinction through laws not only opposed  by reputable  breeders but also contrary to policy statements of  the ASPCA and the AVMA. The opposition to forced spay-neuter knows that this kind of legislation is racist and classist, kills more pets than it saves and inserts the government into a medical decision that’s not without negative consequences and that should be left to a pet’s owner, with advice from a veterinarian.

PetPac led the fight against the draconian AB 1634 last year in California, and is working against SB 250 this year. The latter was brought forward by the same folks behind the last bill, especially Judie Mancuso, who insists that all breeders are the same, and all are evil “greeders.”

The HSUS hasn’t taken a position on SB 250, please note. But that didn’t stop PetPac from smearing them anyway, to throw red meat to the rabid HSUS-haters among its own supporters.

In a series of e-mails to suporters (which includes me, by the way)  PetPac’s Bill Hemby questions the motives of HSUS in having the TV piece pulled down, suggesting some nefarious plot to bully the station into hiding the “truth.”

Mr. Hemby knows better. He’s decent guy and a reputable, compassionate and ethical breeder — I first talked to him when trying to find the owners of a pair of lost Borzoi who wandered down my street a few years ago.  But he has been around long enough to know that when a media organization has really got a tiger by the tail, they don’t back down, and sabre-rattling by the group that they’ve reported on is a badge of honor.

Pure politics, this spin, playing to the red state/blue state divide of pets, mortars fired across the scarred battlefield between two entrenched positions. Playing to and scaring the choirs, and it’s done all the time, by all kinds of special-interest groups on all sides of every imaginable issue.

But this sort of behavior, from the extremists in camps that often seem to hate each other more than they care about animals, is counter-productive.

I’ve called the HSUS out on many of their positions, especially with regards to forced spay-neuter (which they have in the past at least tacitly supported) and with what should be done with fight-bust dogs. I ripped them for raising money on the backs of the Vick dogs while their “experts” said the dogs all be destroyed as unredeemable (unredeemable, like Hector here). Not cool, nor is their current deal with Michael Vick himself.

But I believe that for reasons largely driven by changing internal ideology and partly driven by the continued need to tap the zeitgeist so as to keep on tapping wallets for donations, the HSUS is evolving on many of their positions. They’ve embraced trap, neuter and release of managed feral cat colonies, a 180-degree turn from a past position. They have a guide to choosing a reputable breeder that I honestly couldn’t have written much better myself. And they’re spot-on that concentrated animal feeding operations are cruel as well as environmentally unsustainable and a risk to our national health and security. Cheap eggs aren’t worth those kind of risks, folks, cruelty aside.

The agriculture and food industries doesn’t much like that last bit, which is why they have  outfits like the Center For Consumer Freedom out there attacking animal advocacy-groups and scaring the bejeebers out of many good breeders who are now convinced that if they don’t side with puppy-milling scum, they’ll be next to go — a point with some merit, if the Mancusos of the world have their way. (Just to show how complicated this all can get, the CCF has done spectacular work documenting through public records the shameful practices at PETA with regard to their handling of homeless pets in their “shelter.”)

I live on both sides of the great divide, and it’s my job to talk to people on both sides as well.

It’s long past time for the reasonable, animal-loving people of the world to quit allowing the 10 percent of nutjob true believers on the extremes of these issues to dictate the terms of engagement.

For all his good work, Bill Hemby was wrong in calling out the HSUS on this politically motivated crap, just as Judie Mancuso is wrong in lumping the work of compassionate, ethical and responsible breeders in with the careless, clueless breeders or with puppy-milling scum. I hasten to say, though, that it was Hemby’s first mistep, while Mancusco is the ATM of extremism, spitting out hate along with long-discredited ”facts”  whenever anyone punches her buttons.

I will be on the side of PetPac when SB 250, the new Pet Extinction Act, comes to a floor vote in the California State Senate. And I am on the side of HSUS when it comes to investigations and legislation against puppy-milling scum. I am not one of those breeders who defends puppy-millers because of the slippery-slope argument: I believe we need to separate from these dirtbags because we care about what happens to animals in their “care.” I’m a reputable, ethical and compassionate breeder as well as a person who has run a breed rescue and is looking to raise foster litters in the future for shelters and rescue groups, just because I’ve discovered I’m damn good at it.

I will fight forced spay-neuter because it doesn’t work. I will fight for compassionate, reputable and ethical breeders. And I will fight to shut down puppy mills and their Internet and retail outlets.

If any of that bothers you, I bloody well don’t care. Because it’s not about politics and “winning” for me:

It’s about the animals.

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Stepping up to help in Wisconsin ’sanctuary’ raid

May 26, 2009

I was going to spend two days of the three-day Memorial Day weekend shaving some of the 315 severely matted dogs seized last week from a “sanctuary” in Richland County, Wisc.  However, the shelter called to cancel my Saturday shift because they needed more time for veterinary care, and they canceled my Monday shift because the Sunday crew somehow managed to shave all of the dogs who needed it. I was disappointed not to be able to help and relieved not to have to face the horrifying results of large-scale misery.

Authorities seized 374 animals from the Thyme and Sage Ranch in Cazenovia, Wisc.; as of last week the only animals still at the ranch were horses. A coordinated effort between various animal agencies, including the local sheriff’s department, Humane Society of the United States, the SPCA’s Mobile Animal Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Unit, the American Humane Association, United Animal Nations, and others. My local shelter, the Dane County Humane Society, has taken in the animals. Of course the shelter doesn’t have room for this many animals, so they are housed in tents on the shelter’s parking lots to decrease the possibility of any spreading of disease.  The ASPCA is collecting evidence for prosecution. Many of the animals were in serious medical condition. You know the drill: matted, filthy animals covered with feces and urine, open wounds, broken bones, dog carcasses, horrendous housing conditions, only on a scale of hundreds. I nearly threw up when the first reports came in.

Owned and operated by Jennifer Petkus, the sanctuary had a contract with Richland County, which does not have its own shelter, to take in stray dogs. The sanctuary also took in rescues. Petkus now faces 16 charges of animal abuse and neglect in her criminal complaint (10 counts of mistreating animals, one count of improper shelter of animals and 5 counts of unlawful deposit of animal carcass) and is looking at $315,000 of fines and a possibility of eight years in jail. She was released on a $10,000 signature bond.

Rumors abound about what was really going on at the ranch. Some say Petkus was breeding puppies, some think she was buying them from Amish breeders, some think she took in every animal sent or given to her. Is she a large scale hoarder or just a commercial operation trying to make money? I hope the truth will come out. Petkus says she is innocent and will prove herself in court. I don’t know how it’s possible to see the miserable conditions of the animals that came out of there and still say with a straight face — much less believe –  that the animals were well cared for. Petkus is innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile, the fetid fruits of her labor must be cared and paid for by others, both financially and in emotional and physical suffering.
 
I have offered to foster one of the dogs. None of them will be released for a while until some of the dust settles. Last week they told me it would take a couple of weeks before the fosters would be sent out, and needs could change every day. Many of the dogs will be sent to other local shelters and rescue groups, but given the sheer numbers of animals some dogs will go into foster care.  At this point how many foster homes will be needed is unclear.  It’s all I can do to not feel so helpless in the face of such misery.

***Update May 27, 2009*** (from the shelter)

At this time the caretaking of the animals continues to be provided by volunteers from United Animal Nations (UAN), HSUS, and DCHS. The animals being cared for include 315 dogs, 21 rabbits, 2 chinchillas, 1 cat, 1 ferret, 1 rooster, 14 birds, and 23 horses.  The horses are currently being kept at a separate location.  In addition to the regular care, many of the animals had and continue to have medical issues that needed immediate and extreme attention.

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Filed under: Disasters, animals: pets, animals:general, news, puppy mills — Phyllis DeGioia @ 9:29 am

In defense of ‘unlicensed breeders’

April 1, 2009

I have a list of phrases I’d like never to hear again: “People food.” “Dumped their pets at the shelter.” “Irresponsible pet owners.”

And here’s one more: “Unlicensed breeders.”

To understand just what’s wrong with that phrase, you might have to consider for a moment something that has nothing to do with dogs. Let’s try gardening.

You love orchids. You’ve been growing them for years, in a big kitchen window. Maybe you even have a greenhouse in the garden, a small plastic-walled building with controlled light, heat and humidity.  You spend time out there every evening after work, and on the weekends. It relaxes you.

You also go to orchid shows, where you socialize and talk with other orchid growers. You belong to six orchid email lists, read a handful of orchid blogs, and have a t-shirt with “In the marsh pink orchid’s faces/With their coy and dainty graces/Lure us to their hiding places” on it.

After you’d been showing orchids for a few years, you began getting booths at a few orchid shows, and selling some of your best efforts — at least, the ones you could bear to part with.  Orchid growing, cultivation, and preservation had become your life.

Then one day, your local city council determined that local orchid growers are using too much water, electricity, and other town resources. Some exotic orchids had escaped from cultivation and started to out-compete native orchids in the wild. The fertilizer used to make them bloom was putting a strain on the local sewage facility. And there was also the problem of sales tax — were some of these backyard-and-kitchen orchid growers cheating the state and county out of revenue?

In the way of lawmakers everywhere, the city council had come up with a plan: local residents needed to get a license to grow orchids. And because orchid growing is obviously a hobby of the elite, that license was going to cost, oh, five hundred bucks a year. And if you had a greenhouse out back? Double.

The huge orchid growers — the ones with their gigantic glass houses and insecticide misters and big trucks coming to take the orchids off to your local supermarket, where they would be purchased on impulse by someone who thought orchids were purty and had no more idea how to feed, water, or preserve them than they knew how to fly — were delighted. Oh, not that they really saw the little orchid fanatics as competition, but in these tough economic times, every dollar helped.

The home orchid growers freaked out. They didn’t have a lobby, had never thought of what they did as a business or something nefarious or dangerous. Why on earth were they suddenly being regulated? Who  could have imagined such a thing?

So they talked and wrung their hands and posted passionately to their orchid lists. They vowed to bring all their orchids indoors, get shades that let in the light but blocked the view and start buying their orchid food out of town. After all, they reasoned, it’s not like the city would go door to door looking for them. Lay low, that’s the ticket.

That’s pretty much what happened in the world of hobby dog and cat breeding back in the 90s. And it keeps happening, because laying low continues to be the first response of most people when they perceive a threat. And laying low means no communication, no organization, and no dissent.

And just as the growers in my imaginary orchid world discovered that yes, the city really was going to go door to door and look for suspicious greenhouses and window shades and excessive use of electricity, hobby breeders realized that local animal control was actually going to come into their houses and check their kitchen cupboards and call their veterinarians to find out what kind of care their pets were getting and count noses to make sure limit laws weren’t being violated and monitor the number of poop piles in the backyard.

And like the orchid growers I invented, the hobby breeders had no lobby. They weren’t organized beyond the levels necessary to figure out who was going to be at the annual breed picnic every summer. They had no fund raising machine, no sense of “us against them,” no cultural identity that might have unified them. They were liberal and conservative, religious and atheist, old and young, and not in the habit of doing things like protesting or calling their legislators — or really, even knowing who they were.

They were caught entirely by surprise to find out that their local government thought they needed to trot down to City Hall and register their names, addresses, and numbers of pets, explain which animals had reproductive organs, pay extra for the privilege of letting them keep them, and humbly supplicate themselves before an animal control officer who couldn’t tell a Norfolk from a Norwich terrier, let alone judge which dog or bitch was breeding quality, in order to get permission to do what they and many generations before them had been doing for hundreds of years: have a litter of puppies or kittens.

Imagine their shock to further discover that this was happening in towns, counties and states all over the nation. That it was being driven by an aggressive campaign to end the breeding of cats and dogs, and that it was focusing its efforts not on the big factory farms of pet breeding but on the people doing it in their kitchens — the ones who had no lobby, no organizational structure, little skill at fighting back.

Now, let me ask you one question: is any of this a scenario under which you would feel comfortable going down and registering with the local authorities as an orchid grower, er, I mean, breeder? Or even as someone who has intact animals?

Because animal control has not shown itself to be your friend; to the contrary, in many places, animal control is hostile in the extreme to anyone who breeds or shows dogs or cats.

Your local city council members or state representatives have no understanding of what’s going on — probably even less than you do. So when someone suggests to them that restricting, licensing and legislating breeding will control animal suffering, reduce impact on the shelter system and bring in revenue, they’re all for it. When you tell them what’s really going on, they think you’re being paranoid. They say you’re a conspiracy theorist. So what trust you might have had in them is gone.

Even your friends who don’t raise orchids dogs or cats don’t understand why you’re so against this. If you have nothing to hide, they say, what does it matter that they want you to get a license, register with them, or let them come into your house and inspect your greenhouse kennel bedroom?

In vain you wave your copy of the United States Constitution in the air. Don’t you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Aren’t you supposed to be free of unreasonable searches?

That’s when their eyes narrow. So, they ask, do you have something to hide?

And that, dear readers, is why I’m against licensing dog and cat breeders. Because it’s intrusive, wrong, and it isn’t going to do what its proponents claim it will. It doesn’t increase revenue — to the contrary, San Mateo County found that its breeder licensing program decreased license compliance after they instituted it in the 90s. There is no evidence it decreases shelter numbers, and it does nothing but drive good, caring breeders underground or out of the hobby, surrendering their turf to the factory farms of pet breeding — who are, by the way, licensed breeders.

Of course, there’s at least one way in which this analogy is flawed. Orchids aren’t sentient creatures and don’t suffer if thrown on the compost pile or deprived of water and light. Nor is the orchid being tenderly raised in someone’s kitchen happier than an orchid being grown in a huge commercial greenhouse. (Well, I actually know a lot of gardeners who tell me that’s not true, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is.)

But from the point of view of the dog or cat fancier, the analogy is pretty apt. Except that orchids don’t love you back the way dogs and cats do, so I’d say their passion for animals runs even deeper than the orchid grower’s passion for her plants.

Dogs and cats aren’t plants, and they deserve our protection.  So by all means, let’s continue to have laws against the abuse and neglect of animals, and let’s actually try enforcing them, too.

But licensing dog and cat breeders does nothing but put a group of people who love dogs and cats — love them fiercely — at odds with those with whom they share the goal of seeing fewer animals die in shelters and improving the lives of dogs and cats. They end up hiding instead of running breed rescue groups and driving in transport relays for rescued animals and raising money for animal welfare and volunteering at the local shelter and whelping the puppies of pregnant rescued animals and fostering orphaned kittens.

So the next time you think it odd that dedicated small dog and cat breeders don’t want to be licensed, try to put yourself in their shoes, and ask: is this really a good idea? Does this really help animals? Or does it just frighten, intimidate, and anger animal lovers?

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Filed under: animals: pets, puppy mills — Christie Keith @ 1:18 pm

Good pets don’t come from factory farms, however clean

March 30, 2009

It’s not often — in fact, this may be the first time — I’ve pulled a comment off another blog to give it the play it needs. But here you go: Heather Houlahan of the Raised By Wolves blog commenting on the “model factory farms for dogs” post over at Terrierman, who points out that the cleaner puppy-mill proposed as the solution isn’t that much different from factory farms for chickens.

Heather’s comment:

I find the cage normally reserved for chickens unacceptable for chickens.

Spend a little time with mentally normal free-ranging hens like mine — see how they spend dawn to dark scratching, foraging, exploring, interacting, busy busy busy birds. How they like their nests just so. How they get crabby and bored when they are cooped (with over 4 sqare feet of floor space per bird — 3 times the commercial standard for lifetime confinement — plus deep litter, scratch grain, kitchen scraps, and a cabbage tetherball for entertainment) for even a day during bad weather. The pleasure they show in dustbathing, roosting, inept flying, and all the other avian pleasures. And then tell me that it is perfectly okay to deny them outlets for every single natural behavior and instinctive motor pattern, cram them into wire crates for two years of egg production, until they are spent.

The contrast between the life of a well-cared-for pet and puppymill breeding stock is just about exactly as stark. One difference is, a dog — not even a setter — cannot live for several months without a brain.

A clean, gleaming, automated puppymill that is duly licensed and passes inspection is every bit as much of a hellhole for the dogs who never leave their cages as anything featured on Animal Cops.

It is also every bit as unacceptable as a way of producing puppies who are to live in homes with people. Seriously, you really do not want that puppy. It has not had the benefit of a normal developmental environment; nor can anyone determine anything meaningful about its parents’ temperaments.

Filth and physical neglect and disease are, to some extent, red herrings.

The abuse is inherent in the business model. Bleach is a possible element of good husbandry; it is not the definition of it.

Amen. We’ve known since the ’50s (Fuller and Scott) that puppies need to be raised like family members to be good family members.  I don’t care how flippin’ clean the millers make their factory farms … it’s not acceptable, and should not be supported by anyone looking to get a family pet. Adopt a shelter pet, or find a reputable breeder. Don’t support cleaner factory farms …. for dogs or for livestock.

Animals – all animals – deserve better than to be treated like unfeeling machines. Factory farming is environmentally destructive, a threat to our health and national security and cruel to animals.

Humane, sustainable agriculture is the answer for food animals, environments where they can act normally, enjoying normal behavior for their species (and yes! they clearly enjoy a normal life) –  not be treated like unfeeling meat-growing or egg-laying machines.

And no puppy-mills -- “clean,” “model” or otherwise — is the answer for pets.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture should not be the deciding what’s proper for the future members of human families.

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Filed under: animals: pets, puppy mills — Gina Spadafori @ 7:42 am
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